Reviews
Concert Reviews
The following excerpts are taken from reviews of the ACO's concerts. Further reviews can be found on concert pages throughout this website.
2008 European Tour Reviews
April 2008
"What a pleasure and yet what a shock it is to be reminded of just how remarkable a performance can be."
Carla Whalen, The Scotsman (25 April 2008)
"Tognetti's ACO lacks nothing in stylistic confidence and the cantata, sung with wonderful colour and sensitivity by Mark Padmore, was one glory in a fine concert."
Michael Tumelty, The Herald, Glasgow (25 April 2008)
"Listening to the Australian Chamber Orchestra is like taking a swig of a vitamin drink. Suddenly: pow! The music certainly feels stronger, muscled, hot from the gym. Handel's rippling biceps were amazing in the tenth of his OP 6 concerti grossi, this motley concert's opening shot. Gone were the springing mannerisms of period instrument groups. This was a different sound entirely: robust, contemporary, skipping rhythmns, adrenalin rushing along with the notes. And players enough to tumble off the stage."
Geoff Brown, The Times, UK (24 April 2008)
"This immensely enjoyable concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra identified an ensemble with a spontaneous and highly polished performing style.
Starting with Handel's D minor Concerto Grosso Op 6 No 10, the group's unanimity of purpose was immediately evident in the firm attack and spot-on rhythmic impetus of the stately overture and in the lively contrapuntal interplay of the faster movements."
Geoffrey Norris, The Telegraph, UK (24 April 2008)
"A visit from the Australian Chamber Orchestra always raises questions. Does violinist Richard Tognetti, its leader for 19 years, have a slowly mouldering portrait in the attic? Can ugly players even audition? More pertinently, let's ask about what we settle for from music-making in the UK - why do so few of our ensembles present their music with this kind of ear-grabbing vigour? The ACO's formula is not unqiue, and Pekka Kuusisto achieves something similar with the London Chamber Orchestra or Britten Sinfonia; but still, that is an exception. For the ACO, it is the rule."
Erica Jeal, The Guardian, UK (23 April 2008)
"To its advantage, Sol Gabetta's sound is "feminine", not masculine, voluminously expansive, but intimate, singing, yet intense, with high-spirited, spontaneous playing - and all of this with an agreeable discipline that ideally suits Haydn's Cello Concerto in C major."
Mittelbayerische Zeitung, Germany (21 April 2008)
Sublime Reviews
March 2008
"Noonan's soaring, beautifully phrased high notes, ultra-musical communication of meaning and expressive use of the microphone and digitial technologies were stunning."
Gillian Wills, The Australian (7 March 2008)
"...a brilliantly assured and excitingly projected performance of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for strings, Op 47, music of bounding joy that was realised in playing that displayed the ACO at its very best...."
W.L.Hoffmann, Canberra Times (11 March 2008)
"ACO's program of British songs with pop/jazz diva Katie Noonan was truly innovative and compelling. Noonan has a voice of glorious, sensual purity, her extraordinary technique and musicality giving her an endless choice of style and genre...Many accompaniements were loaded with intricate, busy detail, allowing Noonan to soar and meander above without losing momentum."
Anna McAlister, Herald Sun (12 March 2008)
Vital Reviews
February 2008
“The ever-personable Tan continues to impress for his clarity of touch, intelligent phrasing and sensitive dynamics…this was a superlative performance, musically engaging and technically brilliant.”
Eamonn Kelly The Australian (5 February 2008)
“From the first movement of the opening work Haydn’s Symphony No 47 in G major, there was a unique display of technical assurance where every note was placed with confidence in an immaculate orchestral soundscape, one in which a notably wide dynamic range was perfectly matched to the continuing expressive demands of the music.”
W.L. Hoffmann Canberra Times (6 February 2008)
Rapture Reviews
November 2007
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"Over three pieces, Australia’s undisputed mistress of the Baroque, Genevieve Lacey, radiated warmth and modesty...Her Telemann concerto was graced by seraphic phrasing and supple tempos…Not satisfied with merely reigning over the Baroque, Lacey reaffirmed her credentials as queen of the contemporary in two new works created especially for her.”
Vincent Plush, The Australian (5 November 2007)
“Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Whistles and Whispers from Uluru, is a musical tribute to Australia. Music of shifting tonalities and rhythmic changes, of whispering bird-like suggestions and sounds standing in space, it effectively uses multiple recorders in solo from the highest in register to the lowest. It was realised in a performance of assumed brilliance from the soloist, with firmly shaped support. "
W.L. Hoffmann, Canberra Times (7 November 2007)
“Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Whistles and Whispers from Uluru began suggestively enough with Lacey’s sopranino instrument imitating bird twitterings before moving into more solid territory, the soloist working through the work with a full range of recorders from soprano to bass and back again. Like the Ledger piece, this also invited the listener to watch out for changing textures, the orchestra underpinning their soloist with impressively unpredictable textures that served as a meleonic foil for Lacey’s conscientious delineation of a taxing, rapidly moving dominant thread in this intriguing piece.”
Clive O’Connell, The Age (8 November 2007)
Sonic Reviews
October 2007
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“Composer-performer Anthony Pateras led the first Melbourne performance of his own Autophagy, playing a prepared piano and processing his own output and that of the string quintet splayed around his instrument and computer…Intriguing to watch, as always, Pateras showed once again a lively inventiveness..."
Clive O’Connell, The Age (2 October 2007)
“It was refreshing to hear a new, energetic and insistent sound on the mainstream concert platform. Audience reaction ranged from the bemused to the not-amused. For me it was a strong and original idea, offering the promise of something new.”
Peter McCallum,Sydney Morning Herald (4 October 2007)
Adventurous Reviews
September 2007
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“Swedish trombonist Christian Lindberg is one musician everyone should hear just to see the extremes of human endeavour.
Lindberg has been compared with Paganini and Liszt; a virtuoso who has extended the boundaries of his instrument’s technique…
…In Lindberg’s own composition, ASA, Tognetti’s six-stringed electric violin sounds were surprisingly compatible with the trombone. This rhythmically complex, rock-influenced work is good-humoured and interesting in itself.
The gem was Tognetti’s arrangement for solo violin and strings of Ravel’s Hebraic Kaddish. He displayed an intimate candour rarely seen in a soloist, as if he were transported by his own soul-baring expressiveness.”
Anna McAlister, Herald Sun (5 November 2007)
“…Lindberg’s prodigious technique became evident in Dario Castello’s Sonata Decima Terza, with increasingly ornamented lines executed with the precision and clarity of a violin. Even more mind-boggling were the opening phrases of Estonian composer Arvo Part’s Fratres, with Lindberg’s trombone slide a blur as he negotiated arpeggios increasing in speed and complexity…
…Lindberg played with the mellowness of a horn and the agility of a trumpet. He floated effortlessly over the string chords, adding a gentle vibrato to the high notes and controlling a delicate, muted ending.”
Rosalind Appleby, West Australian (7 September 2007)
“…a work displaying much of the brilliant energy that its composer, a trombonist extraordinaire, displays in performance, driven in this case by fluid, carefully worked refinements of the rhythms of jazz and popular music and by the virtuosity of the players…
In the opening 17th-century works, Lindberg’s sound on the baroque trombone had a delicately muffled velvety solidity compared with the radiant quality he achieved on the modern trombone in Arvo Part’s Fratres.
Ravel’s Kaddish, transcribed by Richard Tognetti for violin and strings, emerged as a sensuous, mournful, exquisitely shaped melody, played with a richness of tone and an exaggeration of its romantic freedom.”
Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald (18 September 2007)
Hope Reviews
July 2007
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“Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who is making her Australian debut on this ACO tour, is an extraordinary performer. But not in the way one might expect.
Many star soloists love to show off their talents in displays of flamboyant showmanship. With Kopatchinskaja, though, the focus is firmly on the music and her fellow musicians. However, this doesn't mean she is a tentative introvert. On the contrary, an impish physicality dominates her onstage presence. She seems completely consumed by the music, swaying around and hunching over her instrument as if trying to wring every last drop of emotion from it.
Kopatchinskaja is not bound by tradition, either. As a soloist, she plays from the score, citing the need to have the music before her to get full experimental freedom. It obviously works because she executes virtuosic challenges with spectacular ease and unblemished tonal lustre.
In Hartmann's Concerto funebre for violin and strings, Kopatchinskaja's tonal variety and control was remarkable as she seamlessly exchanged a thin, hard-edged timbre in softer passages with a richer, full-bodied sound elsewhere.
Daredevil brilliance came to the fore in the Violin Concerto Il grosso mogul by Vivaldi. Kopatchinskaja threw off the leaping figurations and scurrying sequences with scintillating dexterity which, when combined with lightning fast speeds and bold contrasts, created a thrillingly dramatic account…”
Murray Black, The Australian
Enchanted Reviews
June 2007
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"DANNY SPOONER has one of those big honey-and-tar voices that shines like anthracite on the sweet notes at the top of a phrase. The folk fiddler Mike Kerin is tall, taciturn and mercurial, deftly flicking his bow across the strings to catch his demonic left hand as it caterpillars across the finger board. What were they doing playing British and Australian folk songs at a concert of the Australian Chamber Orchestra?
This was one of those concerts where the ACO's artistic director, Richard Tognetti, likes to engage social engineering and introduce musical styles to their neighbours. For the orchestra's highly trained string players, there is a certain reassurance in watching the self-taught Kerin and knowing that the techniques they practise still flourish in a "natural" environment outside the hothouses of conservatoria. The techniques are somewhat different. Classical players have developed bow movements designed to give their sound steely projection over orchestras in modern concert halls, whereas improvisers such as Kerin keep bow-arm movement to a minimum in case they suddenly want to fly off in an unpredicted direction. Kerin uses less vibrato, and when he does it is tighter and more intense. But the looseness of limb that gives the sound its centre remains the same. Both styles have their own brand of cool.
The program started with Brahms's sextet No. 2 in B flat, Opus 18, not his most folksy piece. The reward was the warmth and radiance in the sound, with golden lines from Tognetti's multimillion-dollar violin and mellifluousness from the cellist Melissa Barnard.
Among the folk songs in the second half, the strongest chord was struck by Hey Rain, a lilting wail for a wet day in Innisfail. Kerin's virtuosity in Hangman's Reel was as though his life depended on it."
Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald
North American Tour Reviews
April 2007
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Chamber group from Down Under is tops
“From the first full, resonant notes at Tuesday's concert to the encore's shimmering final note, the Australian Chamber Orchestra was sublime. And the performance by Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey only added to the stellar status of the Central Florida Cultural Endeavors program, one of the finest in memory…
Wispelwey's style, personal and virtuosic in the extreme, had a bold, intense avant-garde quality that made the work seem as if it were being re-invented on the spot. As with the orchestra's passionate, but highly disciplined performance of the Corelli and Vivaldi concertos, Haydn's brilliant concerto sounded the way its composer might have heard it --or, maybe, as he might first have dreamed of hearing it.
Brought back to the stage with repeated standing ovations, Wispelway sat down and outdid himself with a Bach suite, rough and tender and almost otherworldly in its beauty and power. The Australians, who had gone from celestial to sublime already, lowered the tension with their sensuous "Souvenir de Florence." But then, with his solo encore, an evanescent fragment from Claude Debussy's "The Girl With The Flaxen Hair" that Finally faded upward, into thin air, Tognetti took the evening to new heights. It was almost too much; it was just right.”
Daytona Beach News-Journal Online, USA (18 April 2007)
Radiant Reviews
March 2007
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“ACO shines because each individual has the artistry and technique to play music the way they want to hear it.
They don’t do what is easier or more reliable. They don’t choose a moderate tempo because they can’t play faster. They simply don’t compromise.
Sunday’s Radiant concert opened with a classical interpretation of C.P.E Bach’s String Symphony in B flat.
Though it is not a profound or brilliant work, the ACO made it exciting. Their ensemble was flawless, the phrasing intricate but never fussy, and the sound perfectly blended. Their precision never inhibited their trademark spirit…
Finishing with Walton’s mighty Sonata for Strings, Radiant brought out what the ACO does best: brilliant technique, tight ensemble and originality. ”
Anna McAlister, Herald Sun (20 March 2007)
Revolution Reviews
February 2007
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“What does $10 million sound like? Very nice, actually: rich, as you'd expect; warm, full-blooded, even-tempered and all those other affluent characteristics of the top-notch Guarnerius.
The extraordinary instrument, recently donated to the Australian Chamber Orchestra, was heard in Melbourne for the first time yesterday. The lavish gift, a 1743 Carrodus violin, was provided for Richard Tognetti's use by an anonymous donor, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra's artistic director was reverent in his treatment of it…
…When the players eventually took to the stage, the new violin showed off a good deal of its range in the massive Beethoven Violin Concerto.
Having the power to penetrate through a solid orchestral accompaniment, the Carrodus fits easily into that small gallery of superb and clear-speaking violins because of its even timbre - from the piercing vehemence of its E-string to the absence of muddiness in its middle register. The subtleties of character were heard prominently yesterday in the exposed slow movement Larghetto.”
Clive O'Connell, The Age (12 February 2007)